Troubled Tour

David Potter

Description

The South African tour of England in 1960 was far from ordinary. The Springboks, under captain Jackie McGlew - and with fine players like Roy McLean, Hugh Tayfield and Neil Adcock - arrived full of confidence, but that confidence was quickly shaken. The tour began a few weeks after the Sharpeville massacre of April that year, and the cricket took place just as the world was waking up to the evils of apartheid. Then there was the 'no-balling' of Geoff Griffin, a controversy that had a great deal more to it than met the eye, revealing the sometimes unfortunate intervention of administrators into umpiring decisions. It may also have decided the series, for England won rather easily, but this of course was the era of the great English bowlers Brian Statham and Fred Trueman. All this took place before the all-seeing eyes of the new medium of television, and it was one of the first tours to be featured in detail on BBC TV. The Troubled Tour leaves no stone unturned to bring you the full story of that extraordinary tour.

Sujets

• Críquet
• History of sport
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801502511
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
David Potter, 2022
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Print ISBN 9781801502009
eBook ISBN 9781801502511
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Contents
Introduction
1. Cricket in 1960
2. South Africa in 1960
3. Arrival and Acclimatisation
4. May
5. Edgbaston
6. Lord s, No-Balls and Hat-Tricks
7. Trent Bridge and Old Trafford
8. August
9. Reflections
10. And What Happened to Them?
Statistics
Photos
INTRODUCTION
THERE ARE probably three reasons which impel me to revisit the South African tour of 1960: one political, one cricketing and one personal.
The political one is the obvious one of apartheid, for 1960 was the year in which the world - and not only the cricketing world - began to wake up to the horrors, injustice, cruelty and sheer waste of the apartheid system. If we did not know what it meant before 1960, we did so afterwards, and for the rest of the century, this word would haunt humanity. It really put cricket-lovers in a difficult position. So often have I looked at pictures of men like Jackie McGlew, Geoff Griffin, Colin Wesley and others and said, How could they possibly support a system like that? I claim an excuse in 1960 for I was only 11 and loved cricket. And yet, there were so many people, old enough to know better, who just shrugged their shoulders and said, It s nothing to do with us, and worse still, Keep politics out of sport. Such people must have loved the Berlin Olympics in 1936!
The cricketing reason is that I want to examine just why South Africa with so many potentially good players on board - McLean, Adcock and Waite would have been at least in the frame for a World XI - failed so badly against England. The reasons are obvious - one was that England were also good (and better) with two very fine fast bowlers, good leadership and a host of good batsmen, whereas the Springboks were hamstrung with the loss of one of their fast bowlers in a throwing controversy to which there was a little more, perhaps, than meets the eye. It was not entirely to do with Geoff Griffin. It had its genesis in Australia some 18 months previously, and had its repercussions and reverberations for many years to come. The English authorities and the umpires emerge with very little credit, but so too do the South Africans for failing to address the issue at an earlier stage, thus leaving themselves one fast bowler short.
And the personal one was that it was the series which hooked me on cricket, a passionate love affair which has now lasted 60 years and more. And yet I never saw in the flesh a single game. I celebrated my 12th birthday more or less at the end of that tour, and I lived in a small Scottish town many miles away from the action. Yet I followed it avidly. The year before the tour, our family had acquired a TV and this was the main conduit, but because the TV took up a lot of room, the radio had to be displaced and my mother allowed me to keep the now redundant radio (or the wireless as it was called in 1960) in my room, effectively giving me exclusive access to the ball-by-ball radio coverage when the matches weren t on the telly. I was also able to go to the local reading room in the library where I was able to enjoy the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, neither of which had as yet made much of an appearance in my Scottish working-class house.
One was more vitriolic about the system called apartheid than the other. This was the Guardian but it seemed always to have a major problem with misprints, so much so that it was often called the Grauniad in satirical magazines, which had little respect for the newly discovered condition called dyslexia! One can imagine the problems that it had with spelling apartheid ! In the Daily Telegraph newspaper, it was never all that difficult to detect a bias against northern counties and the Labour Party, both of which, to be fair, gave them loads of ammunition. However, both newspapers had a very large page about cricket, even county games, and were eagerly devoured by me even though I did not as yet have a great understanding of some of the terms. Not that it stopped me, however. I came home talking knowledgeably about deep cover point silly mid-offs leg traps and drag , hoping that I was impressing everyone.
Previously I had watched a little cricket on the primitive television sets of my granny and some friends. I was too young to watch the Ashes of 1953 and had no real recollection of the previous South African tour of 1955, although I still have vivid and nightmarish recollections of football matches like Scotland 0 Uruguay 7 in the 1954 World Cup, soon after West Bromwich Albion 3 Preston North End 2 in the 1954 English FA Cup Final, and then Celtic 1 Clyde 1 in the 1955 Scottish Cup Final. But I did see a bit of the Laker Test match in 1956 (but not when the wickets were tumbling), a lot of the somewhat boring May and Cowdrey stand of 411, and more of the one-sided New Zealand tour of 1958. Our TV arrived on the Monday before the start of the final Test match against India in 1959, but that series too was one-sided, only intermittently interesting, and by then the football season had started.
1960 was the year that I first really developed an interest (an obsession my mother said) in cricket, and I am grateful to Jackie McGlew s South Africans whom I, not really understanding apartheid, to my eternal shame supported. I always have had a soft spot for lost causes, and I did believe (and still do) that in some respects the South Africans got a rough deal in 1960. Besides, being Scottish, I sometimes found it difficult to support England! And that was before the horrendous 9-3 game at Wembley in 1961!
CHAPTER ONE
CRICKET IN 1960
BASICALLY HEALTHY but in need of a tonic is possibly the way that a doctor might have described cricket in England as the 1950s yielded to the new decade. One could argue when exactly football took over as the country s national game - some say England s World Cup triumph of 1966, some say earlier than that - but the truth of the matter was that the two sports were not really in competition in 1960. You could even play in both. Would Denis and Leslie Compton play for Arsenal or Middlesex? was an argument for only the brief few weeks when the seasons overlapped. Normally cricket started at the end of April and stopped at the beginning of September; football had the FA Cup Final in early May and began again in late August. The two seasons yielded gracefully to each other, complemented each other and were both all the stronger for it.
There was no distinction between red-ball and white-ball cricket, simply because there was no white-ball cricket. The white ball was many decades in the future, and even the idea of limited-overs cricket, although not unknown, indeed flourishing in some areas at local level, was a distant concept for the future as far as the professional game was concerned, possibly something to do with the brighter cricket that everyone kept talking about.
There were other differences as well. No player at any level would ever dream of wearing pyjamas . Everything was white. Batsmen wore pads, gloves and the abdominal protector , but any thigh guards, elbow protector, etc. would be looked upon as the height of pretentiousness or even cowardice. On the head, a cap was worn. Even sunhats were still in the future, and it would be another 20 years before helmets began to make their appearance. All this meant that the task of a scorer and a spectator was a lot easier, for one could very quickly identify which batsman was which. It is not so easy today.
Test matches were the thing that brightened up the season, but the basic diet was the County Championship, won repeatedly throughout the 1950s by Surrey but won back by Yorkshire in 1959, and they would win it this year as well. All games were of three days duration, beginning rigidly on a Saturday and a Wednesday with no play at all on Sunday, even though that Sabbatarian edifice had begun to crack at local level and many clubs played happily on a Sunday without any real apparent disapproval from God or that even more terrifying and influential character called the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was still able to decide who the Royal Family could marry but seemed less and less able to tell anyone else what to do. He was singularly failing to stop alcohol, sex and cricket on a Sunday, although professional cricket was slow to spot the opportunities.
Everyone seemed to moan about the County Championship. There were 17 counties, so if every county played every other county twice, that would be 32 games which was manageable and sensible. But now, if a county wanted to, it need only play 28 games, which meant 16 teams once and 12 of them twice. This seemed strange and unfair, and it meant that if you had a good match secretary you could end up avoiding Surrey and Yorkshire at least once!
There was a terrible predictability about the three-day game. County A would bat for all the first day, then declare about 6pm and hope to at least split the opener